1. Technical Field
This disclosure relates to corporate liquidity and cash management. In particular, this disclosure relates to aggregation and analysis of portfolios of account data in connection with liquidity prediction and simulation to help provide action proposals that help an entity achieve a desired liquidity position over a specified period of time.
2. Related Art
In the past, corporate interactions with banks tended to follow a non-centralized and non-optimized model of tangled banking flows between corporations (and their affiliates) and their financial institutions (e.g., their banks). In this model, each corporation (or affiliate) and each bank communicated in its own proprietary way using proprietary communication channels. The complexities and inefficiencies of this model were exacerbated by the significant number of corporations and affiliates, and the significant number of financial institutions with which the corporations and affiliates communicated.
More recently, there has been a transition to centralized payment flows and corporate treasury functions. This transition has happened on the corporate side, using a “payment factory.” The payment factory is implemented and controlled by the corporation, and interfaces to the financial institutions using an inter-bank secured network (which may include Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) transactions). This type of centralization provides the corporation with a single view of payment flows and cash positions for each affiliate. However, the centralization also causes banks to face new challenges in terms of corporations consolidating bank relationships, increasing price pressure, loss in transaction volume, margin erosion and loss of customers.
Accordingly, banks increasingly need to differentiate themselves by providing services addressing corporate needs and creating new value-added services for corporate customers. At the same time, the new services need to be oriented toward the value and services of the payment factories. Furthermore, segmentation of customers must be addressed by providing flexible services for large as well as mid-size corporations, and to leverage economies of scale by providing the services across many corporations.